Gila Regional welcomes permanent CFO

Gila Regional Medical Center leadership announced at a special meeting on Thursday that its long search for a permanent chief financial officer has reached its end. CEO Taffy Arias and the board of trustees welcomed Richard Stokes to the team just a month shy of one year after welcoming interim CFO JoBeth Vance.

Stokes is a certified public accountant with decades of experience in the field. He said on Thursday that after operating a public accounting firm for 10 years, he began 23 years in health care — mostly in small, rural hospitals not dissimilar to Gila Regional.

“It’s a challenging time, in rural health care especially,” he said. “But one of the reasons I continue to work in rural health care is it’s just so important to these communities. Sometimes the flavor gets lost when it’s run by an entity a thousand miles away.”

Stokes said he has worked in both county-owned hospitals like Gila Regional, and hospitals which were political subdivisions of the states in South Carolina and Texas. He said that a hospital being tied to the government adds levels of complexity but that he has already met with compliance and others to discuss the realities of contracts and other financial matters in New Mexico. So far, he said, it seems similar to the way things operate in South Carolina and Texas.

The new CFO said he has already begun to settle into Silver City, attending his first service at the local First United Methodist Church. He also said he is optimistic that Gila Regional’s recent climb under Vance can continue.

“We have opportunities, as all hospitals have,” Stokes said. “It is just a matter of being able to recognize them. This is going to be fun.”

Under Vance’s guidance, Gila Regional finally crawled its way from recurring negative revenues with a positive $138,751 after expenses in the month of December. She and Arias have said they managed their steady climb out of the red by cutting costs — including full-time positions in administration especially — and fixing policies and operations in billing, collections and elsewhere in the business wing.

Vance arrived at Gila Regional in March 2017, when the hospital was still directed by then interim CEO Alfredo Ontiveros. She took over for former CFO Mike Metts, who had resigned amidst the previous months’ widespread administration turnover. She has been paid $93 per hour in work weeks that more often than not well exceeded the typical 40 hours, plus housing, food, a car and offered, if not used, travel.

Traveling, interim and contract positions are almost always more costly than staff positions, and this was no exception. As the months stretched into nearly a year, that salary drove one persistent county resident to regularly and publicly criticize the Gila Regional board of trustees for continuing to pay such a high amount to an interim CFO. The board, though, always maintained that Vance was actually a bargain given her successes in helping them right the ship at Gila Regional.

As of 8 p.m. Thursday, neither board President Jeremiah Garcia nor new Director of Marketing and PR Doug Oakes was privy to Stokes’ beginning salary. CEO Arias had not responded to a message requesting the salary amount.

According to a press release from Gila Regional, Vance will continue on at the hospital for an anticipated two months to help with the transition.